So, where do we go from here? The war of words mirrors the back and forth of terrorist and counter-terrorist actions.

The latest salvo is from Hollywood as it ramps up the guts and glory of getting Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty.

The director, Kathryn Bigelow, has a knack for exploring the contours of violence in movies. About an earlier movie, Strange Days, she saw violence as "cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.”

But the cautionary tale we need to see is the other half of the Zero Dark Thirty: We need to see the whole picture - both the glory and the indignities. The Zero Dark Thirty tells just half the story - the easy part, the part about the glory. Now, we need someone to tell the hard part, the part about the indignities.

From Homer's Odyssey, to Euripides play, The Trojan Women, to Virgil's Aeneid and even to computer malware known as Trojan horses, this military strategm has gained fame as an archetype of trickery.

In the September 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission and CIA compound in Benghazi may capture a similar acclaim -- as the nadir to U.S. military ability. Instead of a seemingly wondrous attack on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, we find a humiliating response to the organized militants. The heroes of the moment (Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith, Christopher Stevens) were abandoned to a solitary unarmed drone that captured the slaughter as a live feed to the Department of State in Washington, D.C.

Rather than leave the ignominy of the moment in some library archive, there ought to be a movie that could hold a mirror up to this series of failures - from failure to pay attention to similar attacks in Benghazi a few months earlier, a failure to pay attention to memos from the field, a failure to send in a rapid response team, a failure in the wisdom of peace through strength by attempting to coddle up to those at war with us by having a small footprint.

That mirror ought to be made by the director who hailed the glory of the midnight raid in Abbottabad, and to the bumper sticker mentality of 'we got the guy.'